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^Right. Far less energy-intensive just to go to their own asteroid belt and use solar sails or ion thrusters to redirect the courses of a few dozen large ice-bearing asteroids or protocomets to fall inward, then park them in orbit around their home planet. It'd take a few years, but it'd be comparatively easy for any spacefaring power to achieve.

__________________Christopher L. Bennett Homepage -- Site update 11/16/14 including annotations for "The Caress of a Butterfly's Wing" and overview for DTI: The Collectors

My mistake. You said "you could find huge amounts of water ice around practically any star in the galaxy" after commenting on comets, moons, etc. and I took that to mean you were commenting on a more nebulous kind of phenomenon.

Reread the sentence you just quoted. You'll see it includes the word "ice." Ice is not vapor.

Like I said, my mistake. You wrote "water ice" and I misread it. Mea culpa. The horse is dead already. No need to keep beating it.

Christopher wrote:

We're talking about the needs of an interstellar mining expedition, not a travel agency ... Any civilization capable of traveling to the stars would have long since mastered the mechanics of operating in deep space. The problems involved in mining asteroids and comets are trivial compared to those involved in travelling across interstellar distances. Any civilization so primitive that it couldn't handle a little vacuum would not be travelling here from another star system in the first place. For that matter, any civilization that advanced would probably use mostly robotic mining equipment anyway, so life support isn't even an issue.

Because it's about a kajillion times easier to any civilization of the technological level we're talking about. Because the amount of water available on Earth's surface is a fraction of a percent of what you could get from the Oort Cloud or the Kuiper Belt, and it's vastly more energy-intensive to lug it up out of the Earth's gravity well and then the Sun's gravity well. Earth is the largest solid body in the entire Solar System. Our gravity is comparatively intense. From the perspective of a space-based operation, that makes Earth one of the least desirable planets to extract materials from. It's just not worth it for such a comparatively tiny quantity of water.

You're evidently not aware of just how easy it is to move things around in space when you don't have to worry about fighting Earth's gravity. It's said that if you can get into low orbit from the Earth's surface, that puts you halfway to anywhere, because it takes as much energy just to travel that few hundred kilometers out of our intense gravity than it does to travel on a freefall trajectory just about anywhere else in the system.

And again, it would be immensely easier for the Visitors just to go to their own cometary belt or Oort Cloud. I find it thoroughly absurd that a civilization could've so thoroughly exhausted its own star system's water reserves that it would need to travel nine light-years to find more. Water is simply not scarce in the galaxy. That's a fantasy.

And how could they possibly run out of water? It's not like water ceases to exist once it's been used. If it's polluted, it can be cleaned. If it's converted into other substances, it can be converted back. Yes, we have water shortages on Earth, but that's not because the water ceases to exist; it's because it's expensive and difficult to clean it, desalinate it, or move it to where it's needed. But the difficulty of doing those things is about a million times less than the difficulty of travelling across interstellar space.

If I were a member of a civilization advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances, I'd either use robots or I'd use a replicator-type technology to extract hydrogen and oxygen from materials around me and create water. You're assuming modern-day technological limitations that are fundamentally incompatible with the premise of interstellar travel.

Again, you're assuming a limited technology that's incompatible with an interstellar civilization. Anyone that advanced should be able to synthesize food or water and use robotic labor, and they'd have to have an incredibly robust and efficient industry that would easily outperform our entire planet's industrial output by a factor of thousands.

Sorry, you're wrong. The water thing is just monumentally stupid on every level. As for food, it's unlikely that the life forms of one planet could gain nourishment from those of another planet; at best it would be like junk food, not very nutritious and toxic in excess. The only way in which interstellar conquest makes any sense is if it's motivated purely by imperialism. There's just no material gain that can't be met within your own star system if your technology is advanced enough to synthesize needed substances from raw elements -- and that's a given if you're capable of interstellar flight.

You know all of this for a fact? From which examples of civilizations with interstellar flight are you basing these conclusions?

My point is that while you clearly have spent a lot of time researching this, and while you have a great resource of current scientific fact and theory, many of these ideas are conjecture. You're making inferences -- well-informed inferences, but inferences nonetheless. I actually agree that your conjecture is a heckuva lot more scientifically plausible than what we see in V. I'm not disputing that now, nor was I before. But that doesn't mean the motivations for the Visitors are entirely without merit, as you seem to suggest. And, actually, that doesn't mean that a story is better served by always presenting the most scientifically accepted conjecture as a plot device.

Christopher wrote:

Science fiction is not a license for sloppiness and stupidity. Would you apply that argument to another genre? Sure, maybe it's possible that, say, some of the absurdly convoluted romantic entanglements and inane plot twists on TV soap operas could happen, but just because they're not impossible doesn't mean they aren't worthy of criticism for being unbelievable and unintelligent. As a career SF author myself, I am deeply offended by the pervasive attitude in our society that SF isn't worth holding to the same standards of quality as any other genre, or that it's not "supposed" to make sense or be treated with care and intelligence. SF authors have as much obligation as authors in any other genre to make their work believable and grounded in good research. If you were writing a romantic comedy in Paris, you wouldn't say the Eiffel Tower was 50 miles tall, painted neon orange, and located atop Mt. Everest. You'd put enough basic care into it to make it reasonably consistent with reality. The same should go for science fiction as for any other genre. And saying that SF is somehow exempt from basic standards of competence and believability is an insult to the entire genre.

Honestly, I think you're missing the forest for the trees, mate. There's nothing wrong with holding stories to high standards, and I commend you for trying to do so. Maybe you really do see the motivations of the Visitors as equating to describing the Eiffel Tower orange, but I don't. Quite frankly, considering your stated vocation as a "career SF writer" your dismissive attitude regarding this is rather startling.

Are you then as dismissive of Asimov's Foundation? Of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles? Of Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey? Of Star Trek? Of any science fiction in which the science isn't presented in a matter which would endure rigorous challenges from the scientific method? Science fiction is at its best, at least in my opinion, when it is about the people, the characters, involved in the story -- when it is about the humanity of the story -- not when it is purely a description of scientific theory and conjecture.

As a point of fact, the original V was about humanity's reactions to oppression. It opened with "To the heroism of the Resistance Fighters — past, present, and future — this work is respectfully dedicated" and then proceeded to explore that very human drama, using space aliens as a plot device. The rationale was plausible enough for the story -- meaning that, even if it's highly unlikely, it could happen -- which was the point.

I can't say I've read any of your work but, as a career SF writer, I do hope you're spending as much time and effort on the human equation as you do on scientific research. If you do, then I may check out some of your work.

There's just no material gain that can't be met within your own star system if your technology is advanced enough to synthesize needed substances from raw elements -- and that's a given if you're capable of interstellar flight.

You know all of this for a fact? From which examples of civilizations with interstellar flight are you basing these conclusions?

You don't really have to look at interstellar civilizations to make that extrapolation, you can look at our own. We "synthesize needed substances from raw elements". But what you seem to be focusing on is not the important part of his statement. There are so many resources available in a typical Sol-type system it's mind-boggling... enough minerals and water to supply hundreds of billions of people. If you have the need to expand beyond your own planet for minerals and water, and you have the technology to send a fleet of ships across light years and to other star systems to get them, you'd have the technology to do the same thing at home. Even if they had to come to our system to access such resources, it certainly wouldn't be worth the hassle to bother us here in the inner solar system when all the good stuff (that would be most energy efficient to remove from the solar system) is from the orbits of the asteroid belt to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. Unless they were building an enclosed Dyson Sphere 10 miles thick and had to support a population in the trillions, the resources available in their home system should suffice quite nicely for a very long time.

You don't really have to look at interstellar civilizations to make that extrapolation, you can look at our own. We "synthesize needed substances from raw elements". But what you seem to be focusing on is not the important part of his statement. There are so many resources available in a typical Sol-type system it's mind-boggling... enough minerals and water to supply hundreds of billions of people. If you have the need to expand beyond your own planet for minerals and water, and you have the technology to send a fleet of ships across light years and to other star systems to get them, you'd have the technology to do the same thing at home. Even if they had to come to our system to access such resources, it certainly wouldn't be worth the hassle to bother us here in the inner solar system when all the good stuff (that would be most energy efficient to remove from the solar system) is from the orbits of the asteroid belt to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. Unless they were building an enclosed Dyson Sphere 10 miles thick and had to support a population in the trillions, the resources available in their home system should suffice quite nicely for a very long time.

Oh, I agree you can easily make that extrapolation. My point, however, is that it *is* an extrapolation, not a "given." It's in the nature of science fiction to extrapolate. And while some extrapolations are going to be more scientifically sound than others, that doesn't mean that stories which incorporate less plausible ideas ought to be dismissed out of hand. So while it is more likely that an advanced civilization would stop elsewhere for water, even raw materials, it's not impossible that a civilization that needed not just water, but food, and an inhabited, industrialized planet as a base of operations for an imperialistic agenda (all of which were stated reasons for the arrival of the Visitors in the original miniseries) would choose Earth as a place of conquest.

To be dismissive of the story on that basis alone seems, to me, an overly stringent standard for science fiction stories.

You know all of this for a fact? From which examples of civilizations with interstellar flight are you basing these conclusions?

What a bizarre question. I'm talking about differences in energy usage, travel time and distance, and the like that are matters of fundamental physical law. Just because nobody's ever jumped off the cliff at the edge of Olympus Mons on Mars doesn't mean it's impossible to predict quite accurately what would happen to someone who did.

If you think you have to witness something directly to have any information about it, then you don't even understand what science is.

My point is that while you clearly have spent a lot of time researching this, and while you have a great resource of current scientific fact and theory, many of these ideas are conjecture.

No, they're not. That word does not mean what you think it means. It is not "conjecture" that our planetary system contains huge amounts of ice; we can see it directly. It is not "conjecture" that Sirius's own planetary and cometary bodies would be far, far closer to an inhabited planet of Sirius than Earth would be; that's just plain obvious. It is not "conjecture" that it takes energy to thrust against a gravity well; hell, you should know that to be an indisputable fact if you've ever so much as gotten winded going up a flight of stairs. There are a lot of things that apply to this discussion that we know for an absolute, indisputable fact, and it's those known facts that demonstrate the absurdity of the premise here.

Are you then as dismissive of Asimov's Foundation? Of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles? Of Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey? Of Star Trek? Of any science fiction in which the science isn't presented in a matter which would endure rigorous challenges from the scientific method? Science fiction is at its best, at least in my opinion, when it is about the people, the characters, involved in the story -- when it is about the humanity of the story -- not when it is purely a description of scientific theory and conjecture.

You're twisting it. I'm not making some blanket statement about SF in general. I said simply that the idea of aliens needing to take our water is scientifically absurd. You claimed it wasn't, and I rebutted that mistaken impression. And it's got nothing to do with being "dismissive." I like Kenneth Johnson's V. I think it's a good story, a good allegory for the Holocaust. I'm just annoyed by the water thing and wish they'd come up with something more credible.

I can't say I've read any of your work but, as a career SF writer, I do hope you're spending as much time and effort on the human equation as you do on scientific research. If you do, then I may check out some of your work.

If a writer were doing that love story set in Paris, he or she would probably do enough research to get the geography, language, and culture of Paris close enough to reality to be believable. That doesn't mean the story would be about the geography, language, and culture of Paris. It just means the writer would be professional enough to do the research, even if it only contributes to subtle background texture. Because even if most readers won't notice that background texture, some of them will, and they'll be pleased by a story that gets it right and bothered by a story that gets it wrong.

So your interpretation of my comments is completely absurd and wrong. Whether the research is done right has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the focus of the story is on the material being researched. For your information, I care just as much about "the human equation" as I do about the science. But I reject the school of thought that the setting and universe of the story don't have to make sense so long as the characters are well-drawn. That's just as lazy as getting the science right but writing shallow characters. The setting affects your characters and their actions, so if you want to draw the characters richly and believably, you can't neglect their context.

Samuel Walters wrote:

So while it is more likely that an advanced civilization would stop elsewhere for water, even raw materials, it's not impossible that a civilization that needed not just water, but food, and an inhabited, industrialized planet as a base of operations for an imperialistic agenda (all of which were stated reasons for the arrival of the Visitors in the original miniseries) would choose Earth as a place of conquest.

You're just not getting it. You're saying "If A were the case, then B could be the case." But the point is that A could never credibly be the case to begin with. No interstellar civilization is ever going to have water-scarcity issues, period. I mean, as I said, water scarcity doesn't arise because water ceases to exist, but because our ability to deliver and recycle it is finite. But if you have interstellar starships capable of supporting thousands of crewmembers, then you must have licked any and all water-recycling issues already, because those ships need effective water recycling far more than a planet surface ever would. The basic premise is just fundamentally self-contradictory.

Water scarcity is a trope from stories set in Earth's past and present. Some writers assume they can transplant such tropes whole to a science-fiction setting, but this is one trope that simply does not make sense in that setting.

You're also misunderstanding the question. The question is not whether aliens might choose Earth as a world to be conquered. Of course they could, for reasons of political or cultural imperialism or colonization, for instance. Maybe, possibly, you could justify food being a factor, say, if they had a need for live prey and our biology were reasonably compatible. But water would never be a reason for interstellar conquest. Water is just too damn commonplace in the galaxy for anyone to need to come to Earth specifically in order to obtain it. It's as nonsensical as Voyager running out of deuterium in "Demon."

__________________Christopher L. Bennett Homepage -- Site update 11/16/14 including annotations for "The Caress of a Butterfly's Wing" and overview for DTI: The Collectors

It'll be nice to have Elizabeth Mitchell playing a character I'll actually like. (I loathe Juliet.)

How anyone can call loyal, steadfast, brave Juliet a "bitch" is beyond me but maybe you'll fare better with her character in V (who I have a hunch will be fairly Juliet-like; that's probably part of the reason why they cast her in the role.)

Most bitches I know would react, uh, with a bit less maturity to Sawyer's googly-eyes problem vis a vis Kate. Juliet's a rock; she's a female version of Sam Anders, doesn't matter how they get kicked around romantically, they always behave in a classy manner that is beyond the capacity of 90% of the population.

Loyal to whom? The "others"? Ben? Jack? Herself?

The woman who ambushed and Buffy-kicked Kate into a pulp then pretend-handcuffed herself to Kate to manipulate and con everyone into trusting her?

I'll never believe Juliet is one of the "good guys". She'll betray everyone when it's most convenient for her to do so.

You know all of this for a fact? From which examples of civilizations with interstellar flight are you basing these conclusions?

What a bizarre question. I'm talking about differences in energy usage, travel time and distance, and the like that are matters of fundamental physical law. Just because nobody's ever jumped off the cliff at the edge of Olympus Mons on Mars doesn't mean it's impossible to predict quite accurately what would happen to someone who did.

If you think you have to witness something directly to have any information about it, then you don't even understand what science is.

Come now, there was absolutely no need for an ad hominem attack about my understanding of science. It undermines rational discourse.

Besides, you weren't talking about laws of science, you were making assumptions about civilizations. Civilizations, and technological progressions within societies for that matter, don't follow any "laws" which would equate to laws of nature or science. Psychohistory, as compelling an idea as it may be, is not a science ... yet.

Christopher wrote:

My point is that while you clearly have spent a lot of time researching this, and while you have a great resource of current scientific fact and theory, many of these ideas are conjecture.

No, they're not. That word does not mean what you think it means. It is not "conjecture" that our planetary system contains huge amounts of ice; we can see it directly. It is not "conjecture" that Sirius's own planetary and cometary bodies would be far, far closer to an inhabited planet of Sirius than Earth would be; that's just plain obvious. It is not "conjecture" that it takes energy to thrust against a gravity well; hell, you should know that to be an indisputable fact if you've ever so much as gotten winded going up a flight of stairs. There are a lot of things that apply to this discussion that we know for an absolute, indisputable fact, and it's those known facts that demonstrate the absurdity of the premise here.

I'm not debating the laws of nature or science, nor am I questioning scientific observations. My statement about conjecture, once again, applied to your comments about what civilizations might do with their technology. For example, the following are all conjecture:

"If I were a member of a civilization advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances, I'd either use robots or I'd use a replicator-type technology to extract hydrogen and oxygen from materials around me and create water"

"Anyone that advanced should be able to synthesize food or water and use robotic labor, and they'd have to have an incredibly robust and efficient industry that would easily outperform our entire planet's industrial output by a factor of thousands" is conjecture.

"it's unlikely that the life forms of one planet could gain nourishment from those of another planet; at best it would be like junk food, not very nutritious and toxic in excess."

The only way in which interstellar conquest makes any sense is if it's motivated purely by imperialism.

You even use modifiers like "should" and "unlikely." That hardly makes them factual statements. The point is, much of sci-fi is conjecture. What you're doing is no different than what KJ did for V. While these ideas of yours may have more current scientific theory and observation behind it, they are still conjecture.

Christopher wrote:

You're twisting it. I'm not making some blanket statement about SF in general. I said simply that the idea of aliens needing to take our water is scientifically absurd. You claimed it wasn't, and I rebutted that mistaken impression. And it's got nothing to do with being "dismissive." I like Kenneth Johnson's V. I think it's a good story, a good allegory for the Holocaust. I'm just annoyed by the water thing and wish they'd come up with something more credible.

You're just not getting it. You're saying "If A were the case, then B could be the case." But the point is that A could never credibly be the case to begin with. No interstellar civilization is ever going to have water-scarcity issues, period. I mean, as I said, water scarcity doesn't arise because water ceases to exist, but because our ability to deliver and recycle it is finite. But if you have interstellar starships capable of supporting thousands of crewmembers, then you must have licked any and all water-recycling issues already, because those ships need effective water recycling far more than a planet surface ever would. The basic premise is just fundamentally self-contradictory.

Water scarcity is a trope from stories set in Earth's past and present. Some writers assume they can transplant such tropes whole to a science-fiction setting, but this is one trope that simply does not make sense in that setting.

You're also misunderstanding the question. The question is not whether aliens might choose Earth as a world to be conquered. Of course they could, for reasons of political or cultural imperialism or colonization, for instance. Maybe, possibly, you could justify food being a factor, say, if they had a need for live prey and our biology were reasonably compatible. But water would never be a reason for interstellar conquest. Water is just too damn commonplace in the galaxy for anyone to need to come to Earth specifically in order to obtain it. It's as nonsensical as Voyager running out of deuterium in "Demon."

What you missed, then, in my original statement -- and really the entire thrust of everything I have said -- is that it wasn't only water that brought the Visitors to earth. Water, yes. But food and furthering their imperialistic agenda. Hence the quip that "it's difficult to find good hors d'oeuvres on moons, comets or in orbits around stars."

In any case, even an alien-invasion allegory about the Holocaust still has room for commentary about the precious natural resources of our planet -- about how aliens would be willing to exploit us for them, even though we as a planet tend to abuse them. I understand that you don't like the water angle, such is your prerogative, but you've been using phrases like "monumentally stupid" to describe it which, unfortunately, is thoroughly dismissive and, frankly, inflammatory.

Still, I have to wonder, where do you draw the line with science fiction? Can't science fiction be improbable, simply to prove a point? Bradbury wrote about people breathing air on Mars, even when that was improbable -- yet you'd be hard pressed to find one who dismisses the Martial Chronicles because of his fuzzy sci-fi.

Christopher wrote:

I can't say I've read any of your work but, as a career SF writer, I do hope you're spending as much time and effort on the human equation as you do on scientific research. If you do, then I may check out some of your work.

If a writer were doing that love story set in Paris, he or she would probably do enough research to get the geography, language, and culture of Paris close enough to reality to be believable. That doesn't mean the story would be about the geography, language, and culture of Paris. It just means the writer would be professional enough to do the research, even if it only contributes to subtle background texture. Because even if most readers won't notice that background texture, some of them will, and they'll be pleased by a story that gets it right and bothered by a story that gets it wrong.

So your interpretation of my comments is completely absurd and wrong. Whether the research is done right has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the focus of the story is on the material being researched. For your information, I care just as much about "the human equation" as I do about the science. But I reject the school of thought that the setting and universe of the story don't have to make sense so long as the characters are well-drawn. That's just as lazy as getting the science right but writing shallow characters. The setting affects your characters and their actions, so if you want to draw the characters richly and believably, you can't neglect their context.

Again, I commend your dedication to "getting the science right" but you contradict yourself. You claim that the use of water is a critically poor decision for V (in your words, "monumentally stupid"), and yet you also say, "I like Kenneth Johnson's V. I think it's a good story, a good allegory for the Holocaust." Clearly, sci-fi writers can still tell good stories, even if the science isn't 100% sound. Which, essentially, is my point. I agree, all else being equal, it's preferable to use a more scientifically sound construct. But it's not a fundamental requirement, either.

You don't really have to look at interstellar civilizations to make that extrapolation, you can look at our own. We "synthesize needed substances from raw elements". But what you seem to be focusing on is not the important part of his statement. There are so many resources available in a typical Sol-type system it's mind-boggling... enough minerals and water to supply hundreds of billions of people. If you have the need to expand beyond your own planet for minerals and water, and you have the technology to send a fleet of ships across light years and to other star systems to get them, you'd have the technology to do the same thing at home. Even if they had to come to our system to access such resources, it certainly wouldn't be worth the hassle to bother us here in the inner solar system when all the good stuff (that would be most energy efficient to remove from the solar system) is from the orbits of the asteroid belt to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. Unless they were building an enclosed Dyson Sphere 10 miles thick and had to support a population in the trillions, the resources available in their home system should suffice quite nicely for a very long time.

Oh, I agree you can easily make that extrapolation. My point, however, is that it *is* an extrapolation, not a "given." It's in the nature of science fiction to extrapolate. And while some extrapolations are going to be more scientifically sound than others, that doesn't mean that stories which incorporate less plausible ideas ought to be dismissed out of hand. So while it is more likely that an advanced civilization would stop elsewhere for water, even raw materials, it's not impossible that a civilization that needed not just water, but food, and an inhabited, industrialized planet as a base of operations for an imperialistic agenda (all of which were stated reasons for the arrival of the Visitors in the original miniseries) would choose Earth as a place of conquest.

To be dismissive of the story on that basis alone seems, to me, an overly stringent standard for science fiction stories.

I agree with that, I was just picking apart the idea of an invasion based on that as the primary reason. If they're just here to take our raw materials and leave, it's not logical.

I can't say I've read any of your work but, as a career SF writer, I do hope you're spending as much time and effort on the human equation as you do on scientific research. If you do, then I may check out some of your work. [/QUOTE]

You really MUST read The Buried Age and especially Ex Machina, both by Christopher. I guarantee you won't be disappointed, and your question about how he handles the human equation will be answered affirmatively.